On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

In a small museum in France, I stood in front of a case of rock tools and other Ice Age artifacts. What caught my eye was something simple — four or five sewing needles estimated at 15,000-20,000 years old. It was the familiarity of the prehistoric needles that surprised me — they were almost exactly like the needles we still use today except they were made of bone or mammoth ivory. Of all the wonderful Ice Age objects in the museum — carved spear throwers, flints, scrapers — it was those delicate, humble instruments, that spoke to me that day. I wished I could hold one between my fingers.

I had been looking at Cave Art for several years, trying to learn what I could of our artist ancestors, but somehow I had never thought about how they kept warm during the Ice Age winters. Here were needles that had barely changed all these thousands of years. And though the needles were inert, unused for millennia, they seemed to embody a quiet energy, a usefulness, as if they could still be put to work to puncture an animal hide, to gather and bind it around someone’s body against ice and cold, to swaddle an infant or keep a family warm during long winter nights.

Contrary to the cartoonish versions we’ve all seen of them, holding clubs and draped in loose-fitting skins, our Stone Age ancestors were inventive, highly skilled, and able to thrive in very harsh environments. They were artists, hunters, foragers, wanderers, who made tools, spiritual objects, and even musical instruments, under conditions we can’t imagine. They made art out of everything, from mammoth tusks to bird bones, on cave walls and on the shoulder blades of deer.

In that glass case were needles small and seemingly insignificant, compared to other larger, more elaborate, or more common tools. Beautiful in their symmetry, they were shaped just like our contemporary needles, except they were slightly larger and not made of metal. On one end was the familiar eye, that tiny space, empty and waiting for some kind of binding material, and then the long, gracefully shaped body of the needle leading to a sharp point. Unchanged but for its composition, many thousands of years later and all over the world, the very same tool is still used. And although museums are full of stone tools — rocks shaped for cutting, carving, pounding, skinning, tools that can easily survive so many thousands of years — less is made of these difficult to find needles in their fossil haystacks that have managed to survive thousands of years of burial and decay.

Is there another tool that reaches that far back and is still in such worldwide use?

 

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Like many immigrant women of the early Twentieth Century, my Italian grandmother could sew. I expect that like other Italian girls, she was taught from a very early age to use a needle. For many centuries, a girl’s education meant teaching her what is patronizingly called the domestic arts. She might not be taught to read but she would certainly be taught to sew and embroider.

My grandmother was fourteen in December, 1919, when she arrived with her mother and brother in New York to join her father after the war, after her sister had died in Italy from the Spanish flu epidemic and her mother left their small town with her two living children. My grandmother was put in first grade, humiliated at her tiny desk. She learned English quickly and left school after a short time and went to work as a seamstress. Before long she began the specialized work of sewing sequins and beads on high-end dresses, working in sweatshops and helping to support her family. Her skills would help her survive the depression later on, when my grandfather lost his job at Hudson Motors and remained more or less unemployed for years till Roosevelt’s WPA gave him a job as a watchman. The needle was a way out of complete destitution. My father remembers her coming home with piece work. He remembers sequins loose on the table and how he and his sister would sit there stringing them so they could collect a few extra cents — every penny mattered.

 

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In 2016, at the famous Denisova Cave in Siberia — famous because three hominid branches have lived there over the millennia: Denisovans, Neanderthals, and most recently Homo sapiens — a needle made of bird bone was found that is believed to be 50,000 years old, belonging, very possibly, to the Denisovans. It is now the oldest needle ever recovered and is remarkable not just for its age, but for the possibility that it was used by another hominid group, one we never knew existed until recently. It is the nature of these finds and this kind of research, whether of tools, cave paintings, or the hand prints found in caves, that accurate dating continues to change, stretching farther back into prehistory, making us rethink our notions of who our ancestors were, what they could do and when they did it. Handprints in El Castillo cave in Spain were recently found to be much older than once thought and go back over 40,000 years. Culture reaches much farther back in history than previously contemplated and it includes our cousins — the other hominid groups from whom we prefer to differentiate ourselves. We like to think it was only Homo sapiens who began down the path of discovery and invention, of art and culture — so deeply entrenched are our biases. But we were not the only hominids out there, not the only tool makers, artists, inventors — though we are the only ones who have survived.

I’ve watched educational films about Neanderthals only to realize that all the depictions are basically the same: men draped in skins and carrying spears, often looking like they were ready at any moment to come upon their dinner. Often they are shown alone, though hunting would have been done in groups. The creators of these films somehow didn’t think it important enough to depict women or many other activities besides hunting, so deeply are manhood and virility stamped onto our notions of what it means to be human. If a woman appeared, she was sitting silently in the background near the fire, nearly invisible, maybe scraping a hide, bent over her work.

But Ice Age tools were not just for hunting, nor were they always practical. Our ancestors, male and female, made needles, they made flutes from bones, they painted, carrying lamps and torches deep into caves, etching animals into the rock, they made decorative beads from shells or animal teeth.

Although we think our technology is constantly changing and improving, there are needles in most of our households, and everywhere on the planet, that barely differ from those our ancestors used tens of thousands of years ago. Perhaps the advent of the needle, of sewing, was as formidable an invention as the wheel, the wheel being a far more recent invention. In different ways, such advances allowed us to be on the move, to wander into different landscapes, colder climates. How easy to carry a needle threaded into heavy clothing, tucked into small bags. Hanging by a thread, we have kept our secret weapons, our needles, and brought them along for millennia.

 

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There is a Grimm’s fairytale about “The Spindle, The Shuttle, and the Needle” in which a poor orphan is raised by her Godmother and taught to sew and weave. Before the old woman dies she blesses the girl and bequeaths her the sewing tools so the orphan can earn her living. The girl works diligently, her magical tools helping her. There’s a prince, of course, searching for a bride who must be the poorest, and at the same time, the richest maiden; naturally the diligent orphan fits the bill. It is her modesty and hard work — her handiwork — that wins him over, with a little magical help from the spindle, shuttle, and needle to lead him with a golden thread, back to her.

Needles and spindles figure in many such tales and can be tools for good or tools for evil, depending on who is using them, as in Sleeping Beauty who pricks her finger and must sleep for a hundred years, or Rumpelstiltskin in which a young girl is at the mercy of her bragging father, then the greedy king, and then creepy Rumpelstiltskin who can spin straw into gold and wants her first-born child. In these stories the maiden’s escape usually comes in the form of a good marriage. She is innocent and must go through a trial or initiation in order to learn how to survive.

These stories tell of power, of those who have it and those who don’t, of powerless girls who have to devise ways to get out of dangerous circumstances, who must lose their ignorance without completely losing their innocence; they must be good and smart, skilled in the domestic arts, virginal, and one step ahead, all at once. Of course, they must be pretty and humble, too — nothing can bring on evil like a lack of humility in a woman. In a maiden’s hands a needle is an unassuming tool, it is humility itself, using a needle she is bent over her work, gazing down. Not heroic or flashy, nevertheless a needle, in life or fairytales, can be a tool of power or escape from one world into another.

 

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For generations, women, especially poor women, learned to sew and embroider, to make clothes, tablecloths, to make undergarments and sheets for themselves and their sisters, for their trousseaus, or if need be to sell their handiwork and help feed the family. The same tool aided our wandering ancestors to follow the herds to the coldest climates on earth, from Africa to Ice Age Europe; to make a way of life in places where the temperature fell well below freezing for long periods of time. And it is the same tool recently found deep in the layers of a cave, left there some 50,000 years ago, used by a group of hominids we have only just discovered.

My grandmother’s skill, sewing beads onto clothing, is also ancient. Beads go back over 100,000 years in Africa. In many places, they are found in ancient graves, the threads that held them over the bodies having long disappeared into the earth, though the beads, often shells punctured for stringing, remain scattered in and around the fossilized skeleton. Beads could be made of eagle talons or deer teeth, of ivory or bone, of almost anything, like the 40,000-year-old beads found in Kenya made of Ostrich shell.

 

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When I was first married, my grandmother gave me a sewing box to hold spools of thread, snippets of fabric, buttons, pins, and of course needles of various sizes. I hardly used it; it sat high on a shelf in my closet and I dusted it from time to time. The box was covered with a fabric under plastic that depicted, of all things, zebras and giraffes in brown and beige. I took it down from the shelf for the occasional button on a child’s coat, a small stitch in a wayward hem. But it stayed there too as a reminder of my grandmother. To take it down meant that I had something to mend for my family, and even though I wasn’t proficient, a poorly stitched seam, a repair, was a sign of something more than the act itself and spoke to all the mending that goes on in a woman’s life. The children’s bruises and illnesses, the family falling apart and needing to be remade, the losses coming from nowhere when we least expect them, the joining of used scraps of fabric, the making do, the comforting. A slight instrument, a needle, to sew up a body, sew up the loose ends. I didn’t need to be good at it, but the infrequent act felt important, a child walking into my room with a hanging button, an easy repair compared to the rest of life, made with one of our most enduring tools.

Recently, I was moving out of the house where I raised my sons and into an apartment and had to be ruthless about the things I kept. I wanted to hold onto my grandmother’s long ago gift, but it seemed silly to keep an almost empty box that I rarely used. In the end, I took a few needles and spools of thread and put them in a small plastic bag and gave the box away. It remains a small grief among many. Sometimes I open my dresser drawer and notice the baggie holding the needles and thread — a stand-in for the box I hardly made use of, for the skills I never developed, the worlds, hers and mine, left behind.

A few weeks after I gave away the sewing box I was on the subway in New York City when an older woman boarded. She looked Italian to me, down to her small earrings that almost matched ones my grandmother sometimes wore. In the crook of her arm hung a boxy handbag covered in clear plastic for protection. Under the plastic was that same faded print from my old sewing box, the brown and beige zebras and giraffes. I just stared at her. Was she real? My grandmother, who spent so much time telling me the mystical tales of her childhood, had come back to me in a New York City subway car.

By the time I gave away my sewing box, it was more than thirty years old and it had traveled with me through two marriages and beyond. I stared at the woman’s purse, at her, she was a visitation, a good godmother come to this woman who can do very little with a needle, who has found other ways to traverse worlds, to mend and bind, to keep her head down, to survive the whims of the powerful, to move from ignorance to hard-won knowledge while holding on, as much as possible, to a few threads of her innocence.